October 2016

Wednesday, October 07, 2015

I tend to beat myself up over my occasional bouts of ticked-offness, thinking that as a Christian, as a Catholic, I'm called to higher things. I've often wished a pox on those whose deeds I've found to be outrageous. I call it righteous anger but admit to thinking that I'm probably a better person when I'm not raining poxes down on people who piss me off.

Most of us modern Christians congratulate ourselves that we’re tolerant and not judgmental. All that Old Testament brimstone is old hat. We’ve advanced and evolved. We’re more forgiving than our ancestors.

Shouting, "This is YouTube material!" a 27-year-old British man urinated on a dying woman who had collapsed on the street, the BBC and local Hartepool Mail and Northern Echo tell us. He also doused her with a bucket of water and covered her with shaving cream.

The woman, 50-year-old Christine Lakinski, died at the scene of pancreatic failure.

In a sad sign of the times, it was all recorded on a mobile phone.

Suddenly all those Old Testament curses come into focus. “May his name be blotted out in the second generation… and may his memory be cut off from the earth./For he did not remember to show kindness, but pursued the poor and needy and the brokenhearted to their death.” (Psalm 109)

Yeah, we think. Sounds about right! Everything in us revolts against this sheer outrage against human dignity. We recognize that some acts are so depraved and inhuman that it would be a sin not to be angered by them.

And all of a sudden our barbaric ancestors are revealed to be… people. People who felt exactly the way we feel when we see great evil done.

That’s important to see, because the reality is not that we are more forgiving: it’s that we are more excusing. We have created, for better or worse, a culture which excuses acts which our ancestors would have seen as appalling sin. We have figured out stratagems for avoiding feeling the sinfulness of sin. But when something does break through our comfortable numbness and cosmopolitan relativism, we are as ready to shout curses to the heavens as they were.

As Christians, of course, we cannot give our voice to such cursing. Jesus has very clearly told us that we must love our enemies and bless, not curse, those who despitefully use us. But that does not mean the Old Testament curses are bad or without value. In them, if we know what we are looking for, we see outrage at evil in chemical purity and know it as a gift of God. For righteous anger is not sin if we use it as God intended: as fuel for the engine of moral action. Anger only becomes a sin when we do not put it in the gas tank of action, but instead pour it on ourselves and others and set it on fire. Then it consumes us.

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Yes, yes, yes, I’ll recover my head and my bearings in an hour or so, but just now I am weary unto death with the headlines I am reading, because so much of it is — excuse my vulgarity — unrepentant bullshit. And I’m tired of the government and the press ladling bullshit at me, as though I have grown accustomed to the taste and smell of bullshit and now crave it and would, in fact, happily bathe in it, if only they just gave us all the bullshit they have to spare.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler recently acknowledged that the three Democrats on the commission had decided to avoid Congressional input regarding the Internet by adopting President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1934 Communications Act to regulate the Internet with the same federal control as the old AT&T customer monopoly. To make sure that libertarian advocates would remain in the dark, Wheeler “embargoed” release of any of the specifics in the new administrative “policy” that will act as law.

This is bullshit, okay? “Three Democrats” decided this? Well, I’m sure the White House doesn’t mind. Obama has never been the “transparent” President he said he would be — anyone who believed him when he said nothing would be put into law without it first being posted to the internet, so we can all read it, really wanted to be deluded in 2008 and then sent the message that they enjoyed the delusion and welcomed more bullshit in 2012 — but here we are seeing laws put into place that are not even being discussed by the congress; there is no advise and consent, no debate, no alternative proposals amassed because no one actually knows what this proposal is, and we will not know until it is put in place, a done deal.

She's just getting warmed up.

Read the whole thing and understand that the heat is more quickly warming on the pot in which America sits stupified.

A New Hampshire man has returned to his native Sudan in a desperate bid to save his pregnant wife from hanging.

Daniel Wani, a Sudanese immigrant with U.S. citizenship, is now fighting for his wife's life after she was jailed with their 18-month-old son and sentenced to death for refusing to recant her Christian faith.

"I'm just praying for God. He can do a miracle," Wani's distraught brother, Gabriel Wani, told WMUR of his brother's recent travels from their home in Manchester.

Meriam Ibrahim, 26, who's eight months pregnant, was sentenced to death Thursday after convicted of "apostasy." Because of the Islamic court's refusal to acknowledge her 2011 marriage to Wani, who's a Christian, she was also sentenced to receive 100 lashes for adultery.

As in many Muslim nations, Muslim women in Sudan are prohibited from marrying non-Muslims, though Muslim men can marry outside their faith. By law, children must follow their father's religion.

Ibrahim's father was Muslim but he left her mother, who was an Orthodox Christian from Ethiopia, when she was a child, according to her family's attorney, Al-Shareef Ali al-Shareef Mohammed. She was consequently raised Christian.

Ibrahim was given four days to repent, accept Islam as her religion and ultimately escape death, said Mohammed, but it was an offer she refused.

A small group of protestors chanted “hey, hey, ho, ho, bring Andrew home” today in front of the Mexican consulate in downtown San Bernardino for the release of aa U.S. soldier from a Mexican jail.

The group was part of a national effort to bring home Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi, 25, a U.S. citizen who was detained after he said he missed a freeway exit near San Ysidro while going to dinner, unintentionally crossing into Mexico on March 31, said group organizer Robin Hvidston, of We the People Rising, an advocacy group supporting veterans.

Tahmooressi said Mexican authorities found three guns inside his truck. He was last reported as being held in Tijuana’s La Mesa Penitentiary without bail, according to news reports.

Tahmooressi served four years in the Marines, including two tours in Afghanistan before being honorably discharged in November 2012, according to news reports.

If we could drag Obama away from campaign fundraisers and if we could get John Kerry to shut the hell up about global warming, then maybe, just maybe, they could spend some time ensuring that these two people are freed.

Ya think?

In the meantime, we should set aside our anger (this sort of thing really pisses me off) and instead pray that people with sense, people with integrity, people with some semblance of decency and an understanding of right and wrong can become involved and work for a quick and peaceful resolution of both of these situations.

Saturday, March 29, 2014

I am angry at the people who, having sponsored children through World Vision, having developed relationships with these little ones who now depend on them, would so easily threaten to walk away. I am angry, as well, at self-professing Christians who imagine, with neither humility nor understanding, that their novel interpretation of the Bible is grounds for forcing the rest of Christendom to come along with them on their journey into apostasy.

“Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

Those of you who were outraged by World Vision’s state-pressured recognition of same-sex marriages, would you turn your backs on the little girl in danger of being sold into sex slavery in Thailand, the little boy in Haiti whose mother cannot feed him, for a point of dogmatic purity in an organization which is not the Church?

Do you demand the same purity of the sports teams you root for, of the stores where you buy your comfortable clothes, of the grocery stores where you buy your steaks?

Do you think the Church so weak that it needs affirmation from the Human Resources department of World Vision to maintain what was instituted by God?

The world heads deeper into sickness, and sometimes people who call themselves Christians are leading the way. For them we pray, not because the Church is endangered, not because marriage is endangered, but because their souls are endangered. Cutting off funds to poor and defenseless children will not save one soul. So on what grounds will you justify it, when your own day of judgment comes?

And to those of you who bathe yourselves in righteous indignation at World Vision’s reversal, who believe that your personal revelations outweigh centuries of Church tradition and teaching, who haven’t the slightest charity towards your brothers and sisters, casting our refusal to embrace your beliefs as evidence of hatred in our hearts—and thereby, conveniently and cheaply, a superior love within your own—shame on you.

“Therefore let us not judge one another anymore,” writes the apostle Paul, “but rather resolve this, not to put a stumbling block or a cause to fall in our brother’s way.”

You lay down stumbling blocks at every turn. You do it despite believing that any building with a cross and a preacher is a church, which means that you have the freedom to start whatever churches you like, and establish whatever ceremonies you choose, and call these marriages, and declare that God smiles on them. Your beliefs give you the freedom to worship God however you see fit, but this does not content you, because you need the rest of Christendom to agree with you. You would make your brother choke down the idol’s food, and call him unchristian if he does not. You derive your righteousness from pointing out the mote in his eye.

Some would defund poor children to make a dogmatic point; you would risk that funding to make your own. You decry the actions of your brethren when you are no better.

The Church has withstood apostates from the beginning. It has withstood politics, Muslim invasions, totalitarian oppression, even the malaise and indifference of Western modernism. It will endure, long after the current heretics have been replaced by more outrageous heretics. It will endure even as a thousand counterfeits spring up, ten thousand false teachings, a hundred thousand false prophets, a million impersonators of Christ. The Church does not veer into apostasy, apostates veer away from the Church.

And for them we should pray. We should pray for them, and perhaps they can pray for us, and maybe we can even talk about our differences—with each other, rather than to outsiders who look on our strife with pleasure. Maybe, even, we can speak truth to one another in love.

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Even so, at the premiere of Lone Survivor at the AFI Fest Tuesday night in Los Angeles, the veteran actor and producer shocked the audience with his candor about his role in Lone Survivor, an adaptation of Petty Officer Marcus Luttrell’s account of his Navy SEALS mission in Afghanistan in July of 2005, which director Peter Berg recreates with harrowing, explicit, and relentless precision.

When Wahlberg took the stage with Berg and Petty Officer Luttrell after the credits rolled for a brief Q&A, he looked distraught and distracted. After Luttrell explained how he and Berg teamed up for the film, the moderator, Festival Director Jacqueline Lyanga, turned to Wahlberg to ask about his rigorous training and the rough shoot. Wahlberg looked visibly pained by the question and started on what would become an almost five-minute monologue. “For actors to sit there and talk about ‘oh I went to SEAL training’? I don’t give a f-ck what you did. You don’t do what these guys did. For somebody to sit there and say my job was as difficult as being in the military? How f-cking dare you, while you sit in a makeup chair for two hours,” Wahlberg said.

He continued: “I don’t give a sh-t if you get your ass busted. You get to go home at the end of the day. You get to go to your hotel room. You get to order your f-cking chicken. Whatever the f-ck it is. People talk about what do we do to bond the way that those guys bonded. We just knew what they did. It didn’t matter. I didn’t have to say a word to Emile [Hirsch] or a word to Taylor Kitsch, Ben Foster…who’s my brother even though he’s the kind of actor who wants to continuously debate the debate and everything else…and I love him for it. I gave him half my salary…whatever I gave him…to do it because I knew how great he was and for us to be on that mountain together and in the end I could just look at him and it would break my heart knowing that that’s my brother and I may never see him again. But it just seems like so much more than that.”

“I’ve done the movies where I talk about God. I trained for four and a half years and I was ‘The Fighter’ and f-ck all that. It really means nothing. I love Marcus [Luttrell] for what he’s done and I’m a very lucky guy to do what I do and I’m proud to have been part of it, but it’s just so much bigger than what I do. I love Pete [Berg] for what he did and how committed he was,” he said. “He would never let any one of us forget about what was important in the course of making the movie and whether it was Marcus or the other SEAL guys, if they saw something that didn’t ring true, I don’t care if it was going to be the biggest stunt sequence in the movie, they would cut, call bullsh-t, and grab all of us by the f-cking neck and say ‘no do it this way, and do it right and make it real’ and if you don’t it’s a problem. I was really proud to be a part of that.”

For those of you sleeping in a WiFi-less cave, I'm pretty sure Mr. Wahlberg's righteous conniption fit is referring to this:

To Tom Cruise, being away from his daughter while shooting a big-budget action movie “feels like” serving in Afghanistan.

The “Top Gun” actor was responding to a lawyer’s question comparing the extended time away from Suri while filming a movie to a soldier’s tour in Afghanistan, according to legal papers obtained by the Daily News.

“That’s what it feels like,” Cruise responded during the deposition stemming from his $50 million lawsuit accusing Life & Style and In Touch magazines of defaming him in 2012 cover stories claiming he abandoned his daughter.

What we are seeing as the result of Matthew Warren’s suicide and Mrs Thatcher’s death is not simply
anger. It is being called “hate”. Hatred is anger that is nurtured into an active wish for someone else’s harm. I might get angry at my boss for being a jerk, but when I nurture that anger and direct it towards him as a person (rather than just anger with his actions) and when I start to plan revenge or imagine harm to him or his loved ones, then the anger has turned to hatred. The hatred–while vile–still has an element of rationality to it. It can be discussed and analyzed and understood–even if it cannot be defused.

The phenomenon we are seeing is something worse than anger and hatred. It is rage. Rage is irrational. You cannot argue with rage. Rage is cruel and violent for its own sake. Rage is anarchical and demonic in its absurdity and irrationality. When I say it is demonic, I am not exaggerating or being symbolical. The spirit of hatred has overtaken people, and I fear what we are seeing is only the beginning. Are the people so filled with rage demon possessed? I am not an authority on the subject, but I venture the diagnosis that if they are not literally demon possessed, then their personalities have been oppressed by evil to such an extent that they are out of their minds.

What to do? This sort only comes out by prayer and fasting.

If you have a different reason or rationale for what we're seeing, by all means, leave it in the comments.

Thursday, November 01, 2012

There has been much discussion lately regarding the Libyan debacle, including much speculation about what nefarious sub-plot may have been in play, in addition to the staggeringly obvious tactical Administration failure.

Setting such speculation aside for a moment, I would just like to mention that among the Americans left to die were men who were braver, smarter, and more honorable than our president is, and also more than anyone on his staff is. It's one thing to appreciate that POTUS allowed Americans to die, but when you factor in their worth as human beings, the fact that they -- most of them -- were cut from cloth more noble than anything to which the POTUS and his staff can ever aspire, the tragedy, the depravity, the staggering magnitude of the loss makes the eyes burn, the heart ache, and the teeth grind. You, "Mister" President, you did your calculations, triangulated your politics, and decided -- DECIDED, you cur -- that the value of a hero's life was outweighed by the importance of your election chances. May you live long with constant reminders of your ignominious treachery. May shame and disgrace be your eternal companions.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Vice President Joe Biden warned during a morning rally in Danville, Va., that Romney would return to a deregulated Wall Street, sparking a debate about his inflammatory word choice. “Look at what they’re proposing. [Romney] said in the first 100 days, he’s going to let the big banks write their own rules — unchain Wall Street,” Biden said. “They’re going to put y’all back in chains.”

Republican denunciations of Biden’s use of the word “chains” ricocheted across the Internet. By day’s end, Romney accused Obama of basing his campaign on “hate.”

“Mr. President, take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago and let us get about rebuilding and reuniting America,” Romney told an evening crowd in Chillicothe, Ohio.

“This is an election in which we should be talking about the path ahead, but you don’t hear any answers coming from President Obama’s reelection campaign. … This is what an angry and desperate presidency looks like. He won’t win that way.”

Romney's right and it becomes clearer to anyone who thinks clearly.

The Obama campaign is desperate to cling to power and at this point, given their history and lack of character, you can't help but wonder as to what lengths they'll go to stay in office.